


let the good night decide what she wants me to find

by janie_tangerine



Series: here comes my man [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: ASoIaF Kink Meme, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Breaking Bad References, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 17:33:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Your name is Jaime Lannister, you used to flirt with your sister’s secretaries, you only follow the German football championship, your favorite record is </i>London Calling<i> and the last time you walked in front of my desk some four months ago, you didn’t look like someone who was thinking about jumping off a bridge.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	let the good night decide what she wants me to find

**Author's Note:**

> written for the last ASOIAF kink meme round, the prompt was _So you know how Brienne basically talks Jaime back from death when he loses his hand? Let's have a modern AU version of this! Jaime's lost his hand (and/or suffered some other trauma?) and is ready to jump off a conveniently located bridge... and Brienne finds herself talking him back from the edge. (Whether or not they know each other before this incident is up to you! Personally I reckon it could be interesting if they knew each other but hadn't really interacted before.)_ The title is from Gaslight Anthem, I own absolutely nothing.

Brienne feels ridiculously tired as she walks back home after yet another day of probably unpaid overtime - you’d think that working for a man who made the top ten richest in the UK the last time BBC news discussed the matter would at least mean that if you put in overtime you’d get some nice extra money. Then again Brienne is nowhere near the top of the food chain - she’s high enough that her desk is right outside Cersei Lannister’s office, but not so much that she ever interacts with her, or her father, or her brothers. Never mind that it’s not a secret that her entire department would crumble if she left - she’s in Statistics, and she was hired on spot when she handed over her glowing CV. Graduation with the highest marks, two masters passed with flying colors, and half of the advertising department relies on her work since they base most of their strategy on what she tells them from looking at the sales charts.

For a while she had thought that maybe her hard work would pay off, then Taena Merryweather was put in charge of the department when the position vacated even if according to everyone else Brienne should have gotten that job, and when Cersei Lannister told her that it was down to the two of them but Taena would have looked better _for the general image of the company_ , Brienne has resigned herself - she had thought that putting enough effort people might have been able to look past the fact that she’s never been what you’d call an attractive woman, but after that, well - she hadn’t quit just because working for Lannister Inc. pays a lot better than most places and in this economy she won’t go spitting on a decent paycheck.

Anyway, right now she just wants to go back home, brew herself some tea and see if she’s in time to catch the _Breaking Bad_ re-run that she’s half-sure is supposed to air tonight - at least tomorrow is her day off. She speeds up, already imagining finally changing into her pjs and curling up on her sofa with her cup of green jasmine tea - on her own, obviously, but she’s long given up on thinking that one day she might watch _Breaking Bad_ with someone else. She heads for the bridge she needs to cross - home is just on the other side - when she sees him.

There’s a man on the wrong side of the parapet - he’s hanging on to the rails with one hand only, his feet just the right size for the piece of stone they’re currently on, and he’s looking down as if getting ready to jump, and -

Oh shit.

“What are you doing?” she screams without being able to stop herself. He turns to look towards her and -

Damn. She was right.

That’s Jaime Lannister, Cersei’s twin. She recognizes him at once - he used to drop by his sister’s office quite frequently until a few months ago, and - well. Brienne hasn’t really fallen for anyone since Renly Baratheon in high school - and at least the rejection had been because he was gay rather than because of her appearance, but fine, she might have entertained a few fantasies about Jaime Lannister whenever he walked in front of her desk before going into his sister’s office. After all, she might be ugly but she’s still a very much heterosexual woman with eyes, and Jaime Lannister had golden-blonde hair, two striking green eyes, he was almost as tall as her and he had a dashing smile - no harm in a bit of harmless staring. She always thought it odd that he was the only one in the family that didn’t work for the company, and fine, probably his police uniform never did anything to kill Brienne’s fantasies on the spot, but she hasn’t seen him in a months. Since she read on the papers about a car accident he was involved in, but there weren’t any details revealed - she thinks it was a police-related thing, he and his partner were going after some supposed robbers or something and the driver lost control.

Well, it seems like it was bad accident.

And now he’s looking at her like he really wishes she’d leave him alone so that he could jump off that stupid bridge in peace.

“What does it look like, you need a fucking power point?”

Brienne almost flinches at the tone. He sounds so bitter, and he always used to flirt with the secretaries and look so charming. He’s also grown a beard, not well-kept for that matter, and she tries not to mind - he’s obviously not angry at _her_.

She takes a step forward.

“Don’t even try it,” he stops her.

“All right,” she says. Damn. Better to just do what he says for now. “All right, just - let’s talk about this. You don’t have to -“

“What the fuck do you even know? Leave already, damn it.”

“Sorry, but I live on the other side. If you think that I’m going to take the long way just because you don’t want me to cross, you can bloody forget it. And - I know something.”

“Oh, really. And what do you know?”

She takes a breath and puts her hand on the side of the bridge. “Your name is Jaime Lannister, you used to flirt with your sister’s secretaries, you only follow the German football championship, your favorite record is _London Calling_ and the last time you walked in front of my desk some four months ago, you didn’t look like someone who was thinking about jumping off a bridge.”

Right. Maybe she did overhear his conversation with the secretaries.

At least she takes him by surprise - his expression goes from hostile to mildly baffled.

“I walked in front of your desk?!”

“I - I work for your father. Well. Your sister, mostly. I’m in Statistics. My desk is just outside her office. And - it’s all right, you don’t have to remember me. Stop trying to come up with something to say.”

“I wasn’t -“

“You were.”

“All right, fine, so you know who I am - will you just cross your bridge and leave me alone, for fuck’s sake?”

“I - I really don’t think I can. Especially if you’re going to jump.”

“Who are you, my babysitter? Do you think this is a spur of the moment idea? _Leave me_.”

“I’m not, but I can’t just walk by when you might die without doing nothing, okay? It’s - it’s not that it’s _you_ , it’s that I couldn’t just walk by anyone, all right?”

“Oh, awesome, I had to get my knight in shining armor _now_. You’re months late. Listen, I can see that you mean well, but - just go, all right?”

He sounds mostly resigned now, and - right. Well. Brienne’s always been stubborn and she’s not backing out now. She doesn’t even care if she doesn’t ever see him again, but he can’t possibly not give it another try.

“I’m - I’m sorry, I can’t. I just - why?”

“Didn’t you notice that I’m missing a piece?”

“Yes, but -“

“Did you notice that I haven’t dropped by, lately?”

“All right, I did, but I still -“

“The only prospective I have right now is spending the rest of my life doing paperwork while my sister says she can’t _look at me anymore_ , my father - let’s just not go into that, I can’t do my job anymore, I wasn’t even the one fucking driving when _this_ happened. And - I called the two of them before doing this, and you don’t even want to know how that went either. My brother isn’t even in the country and he’s made clear years ago that he’s not coming back if he can help it and I can only understand that, and - really. No one gives a shit, they’ll probably just complain that they’ll lose company time to attend the funeral. I’m touched, really, but I’m not - I took a decision, all right? Can’t you just bloody respect it?”

He sounds bitter again now, and for a moment his voice breaks towards the end - now he’s looking down at the river below them and Brienne needs to find something to say. And fast.

“Are you really that much of a coward?”

“ _What_?”

Well, angry is better than bitter. “Coming from the person who denounced his former superior because he was covering I can’t remember how many corrupt policemen and who’s probably got enough crap for it in the last - what, twelve years? - I’d have thought that you’d have some guts rather than throw away the towel at the first problem.” She’s aware that she’s being highly insensitive, but she needs him to be angry right now.

“You remember that?”

“I was sixteen, I could read a newspaper. I also remember that you got a lot of shit for it - mostly from your colleagues that were interviewed on the news. And how old were you, twenty-two? Twenty-three? I thought that it took guts to do it and keeping on working there.”

He shakes his head, muttering under his breath as if he can’t even fathom that. “Seriously? That’s the card you’re playing?”

“I mean it, damn you!”

He looks back at her again and she knows that she’s blushing when his eyes lock with hers, but if she looks downwards as her instincts are screaming at her to do then she won’t make her point, would she?

“Bloody hell, you do,” he says, and he sounds almost awed at that, as if he can’t even fathom that she would. She risks taking another couple of steps on the bridge.

“I’m not - I’m not playing cards. Just - you don’t have to do this. I don’t know what happened, but - it’s a hand. You shouldn’t - I mean, no one is - just that.” She’s stammering now, and she knows that, and damn the fact that her entire life has been a sequence of blows to her self-esteem, because maybe if she had a bit more of that right now she wouldn’t be fishing for words.

He’s still staring at her, but then something in the way he’s looking at her goes from incredulous to almost soft, and then he lets out what could pass for a laugh. Maybe.

“Well, damn, I guess I can’t kill myself before the _Breaking Bad_ series finale, can I?”

“You like it, too?”

And then she wants to bite down on her own tongue because _what has she just said_ , but he cracks a half-smile again and she can’t help thinking that it’s breathtaking, even if he looks worse for wear.

“It’s my favorite,” he shrugs.

“Oh. It’s - it’s mine too. Actually…”

“Actually?”

She takes a deep breath and takes another couple of steps towards him. She’s pretty close now. “I was - there’s a re-run tonight. I was going home and making myself some tea and then I was going to watch it, if it’s not over already. But I have the DVDs. Maybe - maybe you’d like to come over?”

She tries not to feel like an idiot the moment she asks that - she has no clue of what the hell she’s doing and probably she shouldn’t invite her boss’s twin brother home, not when she also kind of maybe has a half-crush on him and he’s bloody suicidal, and she’s not - she’s not a tenth as pretty as the girls he used to harmlessly flirt with, but then - then he grins again and he looks like someone just lifted a weight off his shoulders.

“You know what, I think I might take you up on it. All right. Sounds good. But - damn.”

“What?”

“… I think I need help. I can’t even remember how the fuck I managed to get over _here_ and my legs are stuck. Damn, this is embarrassing.”

She moves closer then, and fine, maybe her heart starts beating just a bit faster when she grabs his left hand and helps him on the right side of the bridge. His legs are shaking when his feet touch the ground and she keeps a hand on his arm just in case.

“Woah. How did I - fine. Whatever. You said you lived close?”

“Just on the other side.” It takes them not longer than five minutes to cross the bridge and find Brienne’s building.

She tells him that he can use her shower and tries not to blush as she hands him some old pajamas of hers - they’re the same size, roughly. She brews her tea, and consciously puts on the only nice pair of pjs that she owns (blue silk, it was her father’s present when she told him that she got hired at Lannister Inc.), not that it’s going to make much of a difference. When he comes out of her shower wearing her clothes she’s ready in the living room with the tea and the last cookies from a batch she had baked a week ago or so, and obviously her _Breaking Bad_ dvds.

And he also looks gorgeous, all over, and she can’t help looking down at the table at once, wondering if she should re-arrange things and -

“Is this a problem?” he asks. She turns towards him - he’s gesturing at the stump of his right hand. “Because if it is I can just -“

“No,” she interrupts him. “No, really, it’s not that, it’s just that I don’t usually - oh, bloody hell, I’ve never even gone to a sleepover in my life and I don’t really -“

“Wait a moment,” he interrupts as he sits down next to her on the sofa, “you were the one that my sister passed over for that promotion a year ago or so?”

Brienne goes still at once. “You - you know that?”

“Sometimes I asked her what was going on at work. And - she said that she had to pick a new head for the statistics department, I asked her to look at the CVs and she said that I could, sure, but she chose already. So I had a look and said something like, of course she was going to hire you, there was no match between the credentials. And she informed me that she sure as hell wasn’t going to -“

“Yes, it wasn’t good for the _company image_. I got over it, it’s fine.”

“I think I get it,” he sighs. “And I didn’t even ask you your name, what an idiot.”

“Hey, you were about to jump off a bridge one hour ago, it’s all right. It’s -“

“No, wait, let me just think - the other one was Taena Merryweather, I’m sure - oh. Brienne, right?”

Fine. Maybe she might have given him a small pleased smile at that, but he remembered her name even if it was two years ago and - that’s nice, all right?

“Yes. And - just, if it looks like I’m acting weird it really has nothing to do with you.”

“You shouldn’t. Hell, I probably owe you right now. And I liked it better when you were almost insulting me.”

She knows that she’s blushing even harder as she cuts the conversation by picking the season one box set and pushing the first disk into her player.

So maybe she stops blushing when the two of them start quoting the pilot at the same time, and maybe she feels a bit pleased when he tells her that those are bloody good cookies and she’d be better off selling them rather than keeping on not being appreciated at his father’s stupid company, and for the moment he doesn’t look like he had on the bridge. So maybe he doesn’t tell her anything specific about why he was on that bridge, but after they go through the first box set and he spends what’s left of the night on her couch, the following morning he does tell her as she cooks breakfast (and when she learns that the first thing his father had told him when he saw Jaime after the amputation had been _I hope this teaches you to stop with that nonsense and that you come work for me the way you were supposed to_ her opinion of him doesn’t improve).

And she’s desperately trying not to sound like an awkward fourteen year-old when she informs him that Breaking Bad’s season premiere is next week and she’d be only too happy to watch it with him, if he wants to.

His eyes are so very green and so very amused as he tells her that if there are some of those cookies she has a deal, but he sounds almost touched as he accepts.

She doesn’t expect him to grab her hand before thanking her for not letting him go through with his plan yesterday, and her voice is barely audible when she answers that she’s available for that specific job whenever he wants.

“I’m holding you to it,” he tells her as he starts eating.

Well, that doesn’t seem like a bad prospect at all, does it?

End.


End file.
